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There's a good piece by Jim Davies called 'Academic Obfuscations: The Psychological Attraction of Postmodern Nonsense' which you can read at the Skeptic Society's Lectures site.

Davies discusses why people read obscure passages in academic articles that make little if any sense. In essence, his answer is that because readers have to work hard to extract meaning from the obscurity they value the meaning they think they have found all the more.

So what is the pull of obscure writing, of which some postmodern writing happens to be an example? I argue that some prefer it because each reader has to do so much work to get any meaning out of it, and when we have to work hard for something, we really value it. We can mistake obscurity for profundity.

I'm sure this is correct. And the unfortunate corollary is that writing that is clear and easy to understand is less likely to gain acceptance for ideas that the reader doesn't agree with already.